An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) focuses your sales and marketing on the customers who fit you best, and Pearl Diver helps you build and validate one from your real website visitors.

What is an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of a company that aligns perfectly with what you offer. It usually includes:

• Demographic details for individuals (age, income, job title) or firmographic data for businesses (industry, company size).
• Behavioral traits such as purchasing habits and brand engagement.
• Psychographic information such as values, interests, or corporate culture.

Building an ICP helps you focus sales and marketing on attracting and retaining high-value customers, which makes better use of your resources.

Why you need one

Knowing your ICP tells you the specific attributes of your most valuable customers. That lets you tailor your products, services, and marketing to your most promising prospects, which improves sales efficiency and customer satisfaction.

How to create your ICP

Start by bringing together stakeholders from customer success, sales, and marketing to work through these questions:

1. Identify your strengths — what does your organization do well, and what problem does your product solve? For example, if you sell accounting software, work out whether it suits large corporations or independent startups.
2. Analyze your best customers — look at your most successful accounts and their characteristics: geographic location, industry, employee count, customer base size, revenue and budget, and existing tech stack. Focus on customers from the last 3–6 months who are still actively getting value, and compare them with customers who didn't continue, and why.
3. Review customer feedback — use metrics like NPS and CSAT alongside qualitative data to validate your assumptions. Tools such as Qualtrics can track feedback across touchpoints and highlight segments that resonate with your brand.
4. Combine insights with data — align customer feedback with operational and sales data to find historic examples of ideal customers, and use that as the foundation for your ICP.
5. For new businesses — if you don't yet have customer data, research who your competitors target and succeed with.

💡 Identify your ICP with AI

You can also use AI to help identify your ICP. The Pearl Diver guide on marketing with AI walks through it using Claude as a free example.

How to identify your ICP visitors with Pearl Diver

1. Log in to Pearl Diver — at https://pearldiver.blackpearl.com/login.
2. Create an ICP audience filter — using the characteristics you identified, filter your identified visitors by attributes Pearl Diver can detect, such as income range, age, gender, location, company revenue, and employee count. See the guide on creating an audience filter if you need help.
3. Analyze and refine — track the audience over time. Fluctuations highlight patterns and trends that define your ideal customer and their behavior.
4. Apply and use your ICP — create additional targeted audiences that view your ICP from different angles, for example a time-based filter for visitors who fit your ICP and visited in the last 7, 14, or 30 days, or more than once. Import these segments into your marketing systems or CRM using Zapier or the REST API.
5. Review and adjust — regularly review how your targeted strategies perform, and refine your ICP as you learn more about your best customers.

Need help? Email us at [email protected]. Please include your account details and a brief description of your issue.